Snowdon - The art of suppression : pleasure, panic and prohibition since 1800

THE ART OF

SUPPRESSION

PLEASURE, PANIC

AND PROHIBITION

SINCE 1800

Christopher Snowdon

Published in Great Britain in 2011

by Little Dice

Copyright 2011 Christopher Snowdon

ISBN 978-0-9562265-3-2

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without the prior written permission of the author.

Contents

Introduction

Alcohol prohibition in the USA

The campaign for a dry world

The dawn of the War on Drugs

If you can, ban

Designer drugs and the media

6. The Art of Suppression

Introduction

Prohibition doesnt work, most dinner party companions will agree. In their attempts to suppress popular pleasures, prohibitionists unleash a greater evil than that which they set out to destroy; fueling crime, feeding corruption and filling prisons, but conspicuously failing to prohibit. Few fiascos are more notorious than Americas Noble Experiment with alcohol suppression in the 1920s, and if anyone is winning the modern War on Drugs, it is the drug dealers.

And yet the world still brims with prohibitionists, as it always has. The Bible takes fewer than fifty verses to introduce the first prohibition to the Garden of Eden. After a perfunctory description of the creation of the Universe, the creator gets down to business on the second page:

You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

If this was the worlds first prohibition, it set an appropriate precedent. Eating the apple seems to be a victimless crime created for no other reason than to test the willpower of the two protagonists. No one benefits from the rule and no one will be harmed if it is breached. Here is a ban so arbitrary that it cannot fail to encourage experimentation with the literal forbidden fruit while the consequences of flouting it (you will certainly die) are exaggerated and ultimately not enforced. The actual punishment falls short of certain death, but remains grossly disproportionate to the severity of the crime: Adam and Eve eat the apple, their eyes are opened, and they are stricken with ever-lasting hardship and the pains of childbirth. Not for the last time, the consequences of prohibition create more harm than the illegal act.

One rule was enough in the Garden of Eden but as the worlds population expanded, a more structured list of bans was required. Only three of the Ten Commandments are still enshrined in law in modern democraciesmurder, theft and perjury remain verboten , while adultery, blasphemy and coveting ones neighbours wife and ass are merely frowned upon. But say what you like about the Ten Commandments, at least there were only ten of them. The next few books of the Old Testament offer a long, unfathomable list of bizarre decrees to be enforced under threat of gruesome execution. Most have since been dropped by the various denominations of the Jewish and Christian faiths for being too draconian, homophobic, sexist or plain odd. Biblical laws against wearing clothes of more than one fabric and allowing different breeds of cattle to graze in the same field are only enforced by the most orthodox sects, if at all.

As religion waned, the age of the totalitarian despot provided new ways for whim to become law. The bans and diktats of half-crazed tyrants could fill a fatter book than this but, to take one example, Saparmurat Niyazov, the ruler of Turkmenistan from 1985 until his death in 2006, banned opera, ballet, circuses, smoking in public, lip-synching, video games, recorded music and car radios. In 2004, he prohibited young men from growing their hair and outlawed the wearing of beards. He then banned gold teeth while offering citizens an alternative method of dental hygiene: I watched young dogs when I was young. They were given bones to gnaw. Those of you whose teeth have fallen out did not gnaw on bones. This is my advice.

President Niyazov was, as you might have guessed, a communist dictator (amongst his other prohibitions was a ban on opposition parties and library books not written by himself), but the belief that ones bte noire can be erased at the stroke of a pen remains no less tantalising in liberal democracies today. The allure of the quick ban teases politicians with the prestige that comes with taking tough and decisive action, just as the cudgel of coercion offers greater progress to the single-issue campaigner than the chocolate of persuasion. The phrase something must be done that great clarion call of our timescan usually be translated as someone who is not me must stop doing the things I do not like .

The number of illegal activities in the average Western democracy has long since become incalculable, but it is a rare day that passes without fresh prohibitions being demanded by ardent pressure groups and grandstanding politicians. So fashionable have bans become that they are now a matter of national pride. In 2008, for example, Australias Preventative Health Taskforce urged politicians to outlaw branded cigarette packaging by dangling the carrot of international bragging rights. If we act quickly, they said, Australia can overtake the British Government and become the first country in the world to mandate that cigarettes be sold in plain packaging. (Perhaps he took consolation when Chicago was later ranked number one in Reason magazines list of Americas most illiberal cities.)

The pioneers of prohibition have amassed an eclectic mix of world-firsts, including, but by no means limited to, bans on the burqa (Belgium), shale gas extraction (France), chewing gum (Singapore), miniskirts (Tunisia), plastic bags (Italy), smoking in pubs (Ireland), possession of tobacco (Bhutan), video consoles (China), minarets (Switzerland), amalgam fillings (Norway), boxing (Sweden), Dire Straits Money for Nothing (Canada), incandescent light bulbs (Australia) and Marmite (Denmark). Britains nonappearance on that list is not for want of trying. It has been estimated that Tony Blairs government created an average of twenty-seven new offences every month, a rate of legislative diarrhoea

Such an orgy of lawmaking is more befitting a new republic emerging from the ashes of anarchy and civil war than a country that has enjoyed prosperity and parliamentary democracy for several centuries. Politicians in the most ban-happy parts of the world can hardly claim to have an underworked police force and yet law is piled upon law with the urgency of a nation teetering on the brink of savagery. Ministers might argue that the public welcomes, nay demands, a continuance of the legislative onslaught, and they might be right. As the philosopher Jamie Whyte ruefully observed: Despite its manifest failings, prohibiting voluntary transactions remains popular not only with politicians but also with the voting public. If you doubt it, just spend an afternoon listening to talk radio. You will come away feeling fortunate to have any remaining liberties; if the government took the punters advice, it would put a stop to everything.

An illustration of the man in the streets apparent hunger for prohibitions came in 2010, when Britains coalition government promised to clear the statute books of unnecessary laws and scrap excessive legislation. In the spirit of mass repeal, the government invited the public to tell them which laws to cast on the bonfire, but the resulting website was soon flooded with suggestions for still more bans. Amongst a high volume of entries of the hang em and flog em variety came demands for horses and caravans to be banned from the roads, for the government to make it illegal to be fat and for people to be limited to the ownership of one large or two small dogs. The government was urged to ban bank holidays, online gambling, the killing of all animals, alcohol, tobacco, all firearms, abortion and circumcision. Others were intent on repealing laws that did not actually exist, including some who wanted the freedom to speak Welsh, the right to marry at 18 and, as a result of an unfortunate typographical error, the right to bare arms.